Tran: “They sacrificed so much to protect our country, to defend our freedom… Now they’ve been kicked to the curb.”
As unelected, unaccountable Elon Musk takes a hatchet to government agencies and programs that Americans rely on, Representative Derek Tran is fighting back.
This week, Tran introduced his first bill since flipping his Southern California seat blue – the Protect Veteran Jobs Act – which would reinstate veterans who have been removed or dismissed from their jobs without cause thanks to Elon Musk’s purges of the federal workforce.
Multiple reports have shown that these baseless firings are “indiscriminately harming veterans,” with veterans making up 28% of the federal workforce. In California’s 45th Congressional District alone there are more than 18,000 veterans.
WATCH Rep. Tran discuss his efforts to stand up for veterans in CA-45 and across the country:
Associated Press: House Democrat introduces bill to reinstate veterans fired from the federal government under Trump
By Matt Brown
- A freshman Democratic congressman is introducing a bill to protect the jobs of veterans working for the U.S. government amid mass firings by the Trump administration, the latest legislative response to the turmoil rippling across federal agencies.
- The bill from Rep. Derek Tran, an Army veteran and former employment lawyer, would require that any veterans terminated without reason from the federal government since the start of President Donald Trump’s term be reinstated. It would also require federal agencies to submit reports to Congress on the veteran dismissals and provide justifications for their actions.
- Nearly 6,000 veterans have been fired across the federal government, according to data from Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee. That data found that DOGE has fired about 38,000 federal employees since the start of Trump’s second term.
- “It’s almost like permission to let them do what they want to do, and they feel like they can come in and disrupt by firing, by cutting a bunch of employees just so that they save government or they save this country X amount of dollars, only to transfer that over to tax cuts for them,” Tran told The Associated Press.
- “This is just the right thing for our veterans. So in my communication with colleagues across the aisle, I want to make sure that they understand this is not a Democratic bill. This is a bill to protect those who served.”
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